European Policy Event with 1000+ Participants

Innovation platform of exchange, the CEPS Ideas Lab, brings together national think
tanks across Europe. CEPS Ideas Lab 2017 – Reconstructing the Union took place on February 23 and is one of the main events in Brussels.

Over 1,000 participants of 43 different nationalities consisting of national governments’ representatives, businesses, NGOs and European institutions gathered to debate key European policy issues.

Joseph Muscat, Malta’s Prime Minister

Muscat was the keynote speaker for the event. Instead of delivering a well-prepared speech which he said “would have bored you to death”, he opted to “get into the spirit of this event by proposing ideas, some sensible, others risky, yet others which might sound, and be, outright insane”. Instead of address the crowd as “Prime Minister of the Member State holding the Presidency of the Council of the European Union”, he is speaking as “a European who is fed up of us going round in circles, and of someone who wants to provoke debate”. Malta is currently holding the Presidency of the Council of the European Union.

In his speech, he presented five “provocative ideas” on rebuilding the EU. “Now is the time to double down with yet another unthinkable project”, he said.

Europe Should be the Bitcoin Continent

Among the list of ideas, Muscat proposed that “Europe should become the bitcoin continent”. The Head of Communication at CEPS, Marco Incerti, then tweeted about the statement, which Muscat retweeted.

“The rise of cryptocurrencies can be slowed but cannot be stopped,” the PM conveyed. “Some financial institutions are painstakingly accepting the fact that the system at the back of such transactions is much more efficient and transparent than the classical ones,” he added, as transcribed by Live News Malta. The Maltese PM then elaborated:

My point is that rather than resist, European regulators should innovate and create mechanisms in which to regulate cryptocurrencies, in order to harness their potential and better protect consumers, while making Europe the natural home of innovators.

Muscat then went on to present the four other controversial ideas to his fellow Europeans, including selling citizenships to the EU and opening a dialog with Turkey about their human rights problems. At the conclusion of his speech, he said that he hopes the five ideas incites a few debates and that he looks forward to their reactions.

Do you think Europe should be the bitcoin continent? Let us know in the comments section below.

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